A Developers Blog

Monthly Archives: October 2013

If you find yourself with problems in your publishing site after a re-activation you might be suffering from missing site properties. This is what happened to me. My problem was related to the missing “Pages” library property. This caused other problems such as the site default page did not work.

To fix this you might need to look at another publishing site which you know for sure that it works. Compare the site properties of your problem publishing site with the one that is working. Fill in or add the missing properties.

If you have a problem that you can not access or see any object programmatically in your code or powershell script you might be able to go around this problem. In my case annoyingly SharePoint showed navigational items in the Quick Launch UI management page(items like sites) BUT once I tried to access items through code and hide them I could not see any items at all.

What I did was to re-activate the site level SharePoint out of the box publishing feature that enables publishing functionalities. After this SP did some “magic” behind the scenes and I was able once again to access navigational items and hide them using the ExcludeFromNavigation publishing method.

WARNING: Before you execute the script below OR decide to re-active the OTB Publishing feature take notice that doing so may have unexpected effects in your environment. Test this well before applying to a production environment.

After a organization I know updated successfully their TFS 2010 to TFS 2012 all was OK except that when you tired to access a project from TFS nothing would appear and no apparent error. After looking at the Visual Studio output window I noticed that a file caused problem. For some reason the following VersionControl.config file was empty and Visual Studio could not write to this file. Well I chose a direct approach and deleted the file and rebooted Visual Studio. Surprise surprise all is OK :). So if you encounter similar problem go to the following directory and delete your VersionControl.config file(notice mine was empty which indicated that something was wrong with the file): C:\Users\”your windows user name”\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\3.0\Cache

If you happen to get this problem when trying to access an excel file to generate lets say HTML from the Excel file content then there are two things that are important to check if you KNOW that you have configured everything else correctly.

1. Check that you account that runs your excel service has sufficient privilages to the content database of the web application that you are using with Excel Services. This could be your Intranet website.

2. Make sure that your file extension is actually .xlsx NOT .xls. This also caused problems when I was wondering WTF(please excuse my language) is going on.

HighCharts

The good:

The .NET tools at the moment are more highly advanced in the .NET implementation and configuration of the charting tool. If you want high ,NET coding and maintenance for low or no JS/JQuery implementation this might be your choice.

While there is a licence fee for commercial use, a single developer license fee allows a usage to as many web apps, intranet, SaaS apps as you want to create as a developer in your environment or your clients environment. Licensing info: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts/highcharts-single-developer-support.html

Free for non-commercial use

The Bad:

It does require a license fee for commercial usage

HighCharts does seem to be more heavy when used in different browsers and devices. Not sure about this one. You need to do some testing of your own.

Google Charts:

The good:

No licensing fee

Also has .NET implementation although they are not as nearly as sophisticated as the HighCharts counterparts.

Google Charts seem to be faster in different browsers and devices. Again this needs to be tested by you.

The bad:

The .NET implementations available need some extra work if you want to have the same degree of high customization through .NET code or even lets say styling. This might take you extra time and adjust your timetables accordingly.

Other good things about both tools are:

The good thing about these both charting tools IS that the .NET implementations have their code available to be customized to add new features.

Both charting tools can be configured to work with JQuery Mobile to be used and fit on smaller screen devices.